Ann and Mitt Romney’s Lost Fairy Tale

“I think I’m mostly—you know the great ‘Princess Bride’ line, ‘mostly dead’ ”? Ann Romney said. “I’m mostly over it. But not completely.” This was in response to Chris Wallace, of Fox News, who’d asked if she’d “gotten over the defeat”—and revealed that there was more than one category of nineteen-eighties fairy-tale reprises we were spared when Mitt Romney lost the Presidency. Mitt was sitting next to Ann, talking about other lands of make-believe, like Disneyland, one of the first places he was spotted after the election (“We were just living our life”) and the one in which he would have made Congress act sanely (“It kills me not to be there, not to be in the White House doing what needs to be done”).

Even Romney seems to realize that his role in political life now is as a counterfactual, not that of any sort of leader or wise old man. Ann told Wallace, “I totally believe at this moment if Mitt were there in the office, that we would not be facing sequestration right now”—but there doesn’t seem to be much call for him to step in to play the deal broker. His wife was wearing a shiny jacket, and he had the bland, affectionate smile, with its hint of suppressed tumult, that’s familiar from the campaign; more Mr. Magoo than Cincinnatus. He will be speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference next week, and he and Ann have a foundation, but it sounds from his interview that he’s been filling his time with a lot of babysitting, and not in the sense of grooming political heirs: “I mean, it’s virtually every day. We see the—one grandchild or another every day.” He is “kicking balls, hitting baseballs” and fulminating about how Obama is still “campaigning” rather than making a grand bargain:

This is America we’re talking about, at a critical time. And—and, you know, Nero is fiddling.

More telling than Romney calling Obama Nero is that, for him, our crises have the abstract distance of Rome’s. After the interview, Bill Kristol told Wallace that he was reminded (“with all due respect”) of Gerald Ford. Even Republicans can’t quite believe that Romney was almost President.

But there is one use that the Republican Party still has for Romney, and that is as an object lesson in defeat. The stories that the Romneys tell about that one are a bit of a jumble: Ann blamed the ground game; the media, which didn’t give Mitt “a fair shake”; and that they weren’t “as aware of the passion that was coming from the other side. I think we were a little blindsided by that.” There was a failure to imagine that voters could really, really want Obama. (The more technical aspect of this was models that assumed that minority and youth turnout would be lower than in 2008.)

Wallace asked Romney about his suggestion, in a conference call after the election, that that enthusiasm had been bought with gifts to certain groups. This was a variation on Romney’s comments in the forty-seven-per-cent video, in which, he told Wallace “I didn’t express myself as I wished I would have.” He isn’t doing much better now, telling Wallace that “the Obamacare attractiveness” had cost him votes, “particularly among lower incomes.” How that said anything bad about either Obamacare or the outcome of the election wasn’t clear. (The G.O.P. is at risk of deforming itself around its suspicion that there is something not quite straight about poor people and minorities voting in large numbers; that notion has already twisted up Justice Scalia.) “We did very well with the majority population, but not with minority populations. And that was a—that was a failing,” Mitt Romney said.

In the most self-aware moment of the interview, Romney talked about the primaries, which he said hadn’t made him more conservative but were nonetheless “unhelpful”: “In some of the debates, for instance, you get asked questions that are kind of silly.” As an example of silliness, he mentioned “the famous question, you know, if you could get ten dollars of cost savings per with only a dollar of tax increase, would you go along with that?” Romney had raised his hand to indicate that he’d turn down the deal; now he said he’d felt that he had to.

WALLACE: But you would have accepted ten dollars in spending cuts—

MITT ROMNEY: Well—

WALLACE:—for a dollar in revenue.

MITT ROMNEY: Yes, that’s—that’s a fairy tale, because no one is going to give you ten dollars in spending cuts for a dollar in revenue increase. You’ve got to—if you’re going into a negotiation, you’ve got to stand for your position, know they’re going to stand for theirs, and then recognize that there’s going to be some compromise.

So Romney thought that the primaries were peddling in fairy tales? The theatre of the absurd might be a better description. He is right: getting everyone to reject a ten-to-one deal was “silly.” But, in Washington, the G.O.P. has rejected any new revenues and the sequester rolls along. Looking back on the campaign, Romney said, “We were on a roller coaster, exciting and thrilling, ups and downs. But the ride ends. And then you get off. And it’s not like, Oh, can’t we be on a roller coaster the rest of our life?” Maybe Congress thinks that we can. As for Romney, the G.O.P. is over him—mostly.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.